Indy Charts

The return of Indiana Jones.

In 1989, when Sean Connery showed up in the third Indiana Jones movie, as Indiana’s father, Henry Jones, he was no longer a young man. But Connery, then fifty-nine, had relaxed beautifully into middle age. Playing alongside Harrison Ford’s Indy, he was crotchety yet formidable. The father was a medievalist, the son an archeologist, and both were obsessed with lost treasures of unimaginable worth and extraordinary powers, and Connery turned a rivalry with the younger actor into high-style mischief. Nineteen years later, in the fourth movie in the series, “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” Ford, now sixty-five, is still playing Indy, but he can’t be described as a man relaxing into middle age. He’s in great shape physically, but he doesn’t seem happy. He’s tense and glaring, and he speaks his lines with more emphasis than is necessary, like a drunk who wants to appear sober. In the earlier movies, Indy was often surly, but his scowl turned into a rakish smile—he dared you to think he was afraid to do something, and then, before you had quite registered the dare, he raced away and did it. Ford combined swagger with charm, and he was quick; he moved as if he had steel springs in his legs. He rolls and jumps well enough in “Crystal Skull,” but his hostile unease in some of the dialogue passages is a real killjoy. And it doesn’t help that the screenwriter, David Koepp, who also worked with Steven Spielberg—the director of all the Indiana Jones movies—on the “Jurassic Park” series and “War of the Worlds,” isn’t good at the kind of arrogant banter that was so large a part of the earlier films. In “Crystal Skull,” Indy keeps his whip mostly furled, and his words don’t snap, either.

On balance, it was a mistake for Spielberg and George Lucas (who dreamed up the characters, co-wrote the stories, and produced the series) to revive “Indiana Jones” after so many years. “Crystal Skull” isn’t bad—there are a few dazzling sequences, and a couple of good performances—but the unprecedented blend of comedy and action that made the movies so much more fun than any other adventure series is mostly gone. Stretches of this picture are flat, fussy, and dull. Trying to regain the old rapture, you have to grasp at the few scenes that work—most of them at the beginning. The first three films were set in the nineteen-thirties and drew on Art Deco styling in clothes, cars, and aircraft. Spielberg has a taste for sleek modernism, enhanced by a boy’s-illustrated-book notion of cool—everything was a little more streamlined and snazzy than life. “Crystal Skull” is set in the nineteen-fifties, and it begins, in Nevada, with the same quintessence of period style. As kids hot-rod across military sites with Elvis on the radio, Spielberg catches the era’s uneasy mixture of blandness, latent revolt, and apocalypse, the jukebox-and-pompadour youth culture side by side with nuclear fears.

There is a brilliant, unnervingly funny sequence in which Indy, after escaping some K.G.B. agents (they were trying to steal some of his earlier finds, hoping to use their powers to control America), wanders into a small town with neat wooden houses and square, close-cropped lawns adorned with smiling mannequins of typical American families. Indy enters a house, where “The Howdy Doody Show” blares from a TV. Suddenly, he hears a loudspeaker announce a countdown and realizes that he’s about to be nuked in a test blast. In a later sequence, young Shia LaBeouf makes his entrance wearing a black leather jacket and riding a motorcycle—like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One.” He’s a snarling kid named Mutt, with a thick, frequently combed wave of hair; he calls Indy “Teach,” and he needs a father—like James Dean in “Rebel Without a Cause.” The K.G.B. agent Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett, takes off from Lotte Lenya’s slit-eyed Commie menace in “From Russia with Love.” Blanchett wears a full-body flight suit in Soviet gray—drabness turned into fashion by her trim figure—and a rapier hangs from her waist. She enunciates like crazy in Russian-accented English and tilts her cheekbones toward the camera. As is often the case with this actress, she’s the best thing in the picture.

One tries hard not to be distracted from any available pleasure by the plot—thickly woven gibberish about the lost Amazonian city of Akator (formerly known as El Dorado), a crystal skull that has been taken from a temple, and a brain-fried archeologist nicknamed Ox (a quavering John Hurt, who is no ox). Sure enough, after a while the movie settles happily into one of those long chases which Spielberg does better than anyone else. The good guys hurtle down a jungle road in an open truck, while Blanchett and her henchmen follow in another truck on a parallel road. The two sides shoot at each other, various people jump, or are flung back and forth, like volleyballs, between the vehicles, and LaBeouf, after a sword fight and a karate match with Blanchett, winds up straddling the trucks and receiving many blows to the crotch from passing branches, before grabbing onto a vine and swinging his way through the jungle. The sequence ends with Indy and friends going over a cliff in their truck. As they fall, they hit a tree sticking out from the cliff wall, which bends slowly downward, like a giant sapling, and deposits them gently in a river below, where the truck turns into a pontoon boat. In a sequence like that, with wild improbabilities linked by speed and rhythm, Spielberg re-creates the spirit of Buster Keaton’s most elaborately synchronized gags, but on a much grander scale. (The Spielberg chase has been the subject of an hommage on TV’s “Family Guy,” in which Peter Griffin fights a giant chicken on many moving vehicles.)

The first Indiana Jones movie, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), had a romping confidence that was electrifying. It was not just an action-adventure movie; it was a spoof of an action-adventure movie, an exuberant parody of the kind of schlock shown at weekend matinées in the fifties—movies about cursed tombs and strange rites and “natives” chanting mumbo-jumbo in studio jungles, or waving swords amid the bazaars of some back-lot Middle East. The stolid hero would gently approach the “love interest,” a scientist’s daughter. In “Raiders,” Karen Allen was the love interest, and, flirting and scrapping with Ford, she had a huge smile and a directly sexual way about her that smashed old cautions. The pattern was set with that film and it varied little in “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” (1984) and “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). At the center of the movies was a search for a buried sacred object (an ark, a stone, a grail) from the ancient world. To prevent the villains from getting hold of it (Nazis in crisp uniforms appeared in two of the pictures; a wild-eyed, blood-sacrificial Thuggee cult in the third), Indy set off from his quiet classroom for some exotic, sun-drenched place, where he would rout thirty excitable men in turbans by using just his fists, a whip, and a revolver. A hard-fighting woman joined his quest, only to prove more difficult to handle than the bad guys. To reach the tomb of the sanctified object, he entered filthy pits and mucky tunnels lined with snakes, tarantulas, scorpions, and rats. He had to be spiritually pure, as well as physically adroit, to get past the swords, spikes, and moving walls that booby-trapped the entrance to the inner chamber. Yet Indy never wanted the sacred object for himself (the relics the K.G.B. were after had been laid away in a warehouse); he usually returned it to its rightful owner or just left it in place. The search was everything; renunciation of the spoils was his purity. As he left the chamber, it collapsed around him, but he escaped.

The movies managed to create a formula and add new surprises at the same time. Working before digital technology eliminated gravity, Spielberg kept his characters on the ground, where he was forced to be inventive. In “Raiders,” there was an eccentrically staged, infinitely dangerous fight between Indy and a bare-chested bruiser. As the wings and moving propellers of a partly unmoored Nazi warplane passed in a circle over their heads, the two men swung and ducked in alternating rhythm. There’s nothing that wonderful in “Crystal Skull”—fistfights with the K.G.B. henchmen go on forever, blow after blow. And, despite the greater flexibility of digital, Spielberg isn’t able to create the awed anticipation and tensions of the earlier films: the entrance-to-the-tomb scenes are pedestrian and unscary. Karen Allen turns up again, but her reunion with Ford is a sexless dud—a disappointment for older fans and probably a puzzler for people who have never seen the earlier movies. Blanchett should be the sexual aggressor here. You expect her to make a pass at LaBeouf (a trial that would test any young man), but it never happens. Reckless daring is what’s missing from “Crystal Skull.” The movie leaves a faint aura of depression, because you don’t want to think of daring as the exclusive property of youth. There must be a way for middle-aged men to take chances and leap over chasms, but repeating themselves with less conviction isn’t it. ♦

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